(1) Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a system for ego-motion compensation during video processing and, more particularly, to a system for ego-motion compensation during video processing which is accurate and computationally efficient.
(2) Description of Related Art
With the advent of modern computers, sensors and the internet, the amount of data being collected is far outpacing current capabilities of computing platforms to process them. This is further exacerbated for intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) applications where there is also a need for real-time processing of the large volume of data collected from computers on aerial vehicles, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), helicopters and satellites to enable fast situational awareness and response capabilities. A key requirement for video processing from a moving platform (e.g., vehicle) is the need to compensate ego-motion of the platform in order to robustly detect all the independent moving objects in the scene. Prevalent methods of estimating the camera ego-motion from a video require feature detection and optical flow, where features are detected in the first frame, and then matched in the second frame (see, for example, Literature Reference Nos. 1-3 of the List of Incorporated Literature References). These methods are highly computation-intensive.
In U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/330,462, “A Valley Search Method for Estimating Ego-Motion of a Camera from Videos” (which is hereby incorporated by reference as though fully set forth herein), a fast and robust method to estimate ego-motion from videos taken by an aerial vehicle was disclosed. However, a continuing need exists for a method that combines a rough estimation of camera ego-motion with the valley search method to improve performance while saving computational cost.